One thing I loved immediately was how Django is filled with legalisms. King is forever asking for and giving receipts. Everything is money, trade. Morals are separate: he’s embarrassed by slavery, but what the hell, he’ll profit in the meantime. The evil southern “businessmen” wear white shits, white hats, marvelous to see Don Johnson, Leo DeCaprio embodying these egregious ethics. Leo’s Candy is forever citing the laws of this, his, county!

King tells Johnson’s Big Daddy something the law says; “Not on my land,” answers Big Daddy. They’re all lawyers, all slavers, all hell-bound.

Imagine Judgment. God says, “I told you, Don’t kill!” and we say, “Yeah, but this is Highlands County, FL, USA: Here the law says (laws written by us) …” And God says, “I told you, Don’t kill!” And we get to say nothing further.

There’s a scene where Big Daddy leads a bunch of proto-KKKers to stomp King and “his uppity n”-word (Bowdlerizing K. 2016 07 31). Their hoods don’t fit, the eye holes aren’t tailored correctly. Big Daddy says this is a raid, they don’t need to see, long as the horses can see! The men are put below the horses as ethical beings. Quite right: all wearing white: white suits, white hats, white KKK hoods.
Yeah, Swift’s Gulliver and his houyhnhnms.

With Jan in Nova Scotia my pace of watching DVDs quickens and I get to
watch the movies unimpeded she might resist.
Like Tarantino: a QT film cannot be shown to Jan, at least not by me.
Big deal, I’m half a QT fan, not a whole QT fan, at least part of me
is repelled by him and remains repelled no matter how many marvelous
things he also does.

Django is so complex I don’t even know how to discuss it with myself!

I’ll mention a couple of things I love:
I love all the legalisms of Candyland. Lawyers, contracts, receipts …

I love (evilly) how the concept of rights and freedom is completely
tied to the concept of property: you can do what you want with your
n-: no counterbalancing considerations, no public good …
I love how the people in their evil culture accept their evil culture:
the women for example acting like belles while the n-women are
tortured, perverted …

I’m in awe of the casting and acting
and cultural relativism in all of the worlds imagined: German
subgroups, Australian subgroups
oh, and the language jokes: “Speak English please.”

Wish I knew someone to watch it with, discuss it with.
Actually, I think I’ll watch it again, at least in part, before returning it.

In awe of the body language, esp the male body language QT saturates us with.

Some of the throwaway jokes were priceless: “The D is silent”: as he
shoots the guy.

Kill Bill did blade culture to the hilt, Django does
gunpowder/projectile culture to the hilt: in all cases, all filmed
mammals are depicted as liquid-filled balloons, ready to splash.

SamLJax’s fence straddling black was astounding,
one contradiction was grotesque, unswallowable: when, back stage as it
were, in a private room in Candyland, Candy entered, SamL’s house
ni- is seated, drinking brandy from a fancy snifter:
SamL’s house ni- Remains Seated!!! talks familiarly to the supposed bossman.

Julius Caesar made himself dictator, the Roman senators swallowed it,
JC could prey on senator after senator, that was all alright,
but when JC had had enough of it, time to exit, glory all used up [50! years of age], he did the One Sure Thing that would succeed as suicide: he remained seated as senators came into the room! [Exit, JC, stage left. Et tu Brute.]

body language: gotta add
clothes language
& Set language!

clothing communicates Rank!
So do Sets!

the social and economic hierarchy are clear in how the plantation
owners are dressed. Jon Johnson marvelous as Big Daddy.
Chairs! who’s seated, in what
type of chair communicates Authority!

As in Quest for Fire, the animal skins aren’t for warmth and they’re
certainly not for modesty, there was no modesty, they’re for Rank.
The chair isn’t for comfort, isn’t for weariness; it’s for authority, Rank.

My office mate at Colby talked in awe about the Chair just bestowed on
Marshall McLuhan by Fordham. [1967 or so]

When I was in the army we had a physical training test, there was a
throne for whoever did the most: for that occasion, it wasn’t the
sergeant who sat, it wasn’t the Lt, it was the recruit who’d just done
100 squat jumps.

I acknowledge QT as a master of all such things.

There was more, to and fro, but that’s enough for now, I’m happy with that.

I just add:
QT inserted a lot of material he could have made a fuss about: King handing the rifle to the shackled slave and asking him to hold it for him, please. The downed slavers are caterwauling about everything except that. But there are two acting / directing things he did marvelously, showing his casting and directing skill and the amazing skill of the stars (and who knows who else besides): J Foxx and SamLJax pitch perfect diapason of dumb n-, genius n-, accomodating n- stuff.
I’m reminded of Lawrence of Arabia where Anthony Quinn played an arab who really didn’t know what banknotes where, he was looking for gold. He squeezes millions of pounds of Brit bank notes in a fury. Now that’s acting.
Django’s pre-literate responses are priceless.
And SamLJax’s evil suffering insect body language vaults him into company with Charlie Chaplin, Richard Pryor, John Cleese …

Oh, and I gotta say: has makeup ever looked better on an actor? God, I love every inch of that motherfucker.

One thing that was a little bit much I swallowed anyway: King serving Django: serving beer, serving coffee … exquisitely polite.

whoops, lost the image

Note: Tarantino knew that there was an Italian film called Django, film series I guess [I’m gonna take a look]: he gave the Italian star a spot in this film. Fine: QT sees all kinds of crap, make an embarrassing fun out of all of it, very skillful, very clever, kick him in the head. But does QT know my Django?
Django Reinhardt: gypsy jazz guitar!

thanx wsj

Freedom

Anyone can be technically free or not-free in any local jurisdiction (that defines what freedom means), but the idea that a human could be free in any human society, meaning what I mean by freedom (since thirty and following), is preposterous.

I babbled a lot of additional stuff on Django to theMarcus: a string of such text is offset below, omitting the them-to-me parts for the moment. Here I develop some of the points that first imposed themselves on me that I then action-painted to them.